The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin (free ereaders txt) 📗

“Yeah! Wait for me!” she said.

She turned back to Jake. “Well. Um. Nice to see you again. It’s Jake, right?”

He nodded. “Good memory,” he said. “Amri?”

“Short for Amrita.” She rolled her eyes and pushed a hand through her short hair. “My mom and dad are old hippies.”

Jake leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. “I think it’s a nice name.”

Her cheeks flushed again.

“Amri! Let’s go!” her friend called.

“Well. See you around,” she said.

“See you around,” Jake said.

She ran to catch up with her friends, waved at him over her shoulder, and then she was gone. Jake turned back to the water. He saw the bees in the dandelions. He saw Cheney sprinting back up the lawn. He saw Yogi’s pink kite high in the air over the water. He thought of Amri’s green eyes, which grew dark when she smiled.

21 Requeening

If they cannot find [the queen], they return desolate home, and by their sorrowful tones reveal their deep sense of so deplorable a calamity. Their note at such times, more especially when they first realize their loss, is of a peculiarly mournful character; it sounds somewhat like a succession of wailings on the minor key.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

Alice stared at Nancy like she was speaking a foreign language. Behind her purple-framed glasses, her friend’s large brown eyes blinked under blue eye shadow and thick mascara. Had Nancy been wearing the same makeup since high school? Alice wondered.

She’d only been half listening to Nancy chattering away across the table from her in the conference room as they stuffed envelopes for the county-wide noxious-weed mailing.

“Really putting our education to use here,” Alice had joked, irked that this job had fallen on her.

The intern was working on some problem with the servers, and Debi Jeffreys, the office manager, claimed she didn’t have room on her small desk for the mailing job. Last year she filed a workers’ comp claim because she said the filing cabinets were not ergonomically correct and caused her neck pain. Since then the unspoken rule was whatever Debi wanted, Debi got.

Rich Carlson, who was in charge of all annual grant money from the state, said the mailing had to be posted by midnight to qualify for funding. Alice was not surprised that Rich would micro-manage the mailing without actually helping out, and annoyed that he had waited until the last minute.

“Teamwork! That’s what holds this place together,” Rich had said, dropping a large box on the table with a thunk.

Alice glowered at his back. The memory of their conversation about her retirement plan was still fresh in her mind.

“Well, I guess old Rich isn’t on the team,” she said, smirking at Nancy and reaching for a stack of fliers.

“Well, Alice, I’m sure Mr. Carlson has important things going on today.”

Alice snorted, but Nancy didn’t crack a smile.

“Right!” Alice said. “I’m sure he’s in his office right now making a color-coded spreadsheet of his spreadsheets.”

Their running joke was how Rich filled up his time without really doing anything. He buzzed around the office, checking up on everyone else but serving no clear function. Everyone knew he collected a level-one salary with a 5 percent annual raise and a yearly bonus built in. Alice hadn’t had a raise in four years.

“Sorry, Alice,” Bill had said at her annual review in March, wagging his big head and frowning. “The recession, you know. Our budget is frozen. I’d do it if I could. You are invaluable to us.”

“. . . You don’t know what pressures the managers might be under, Alice,” Nancy was saying. “They do a lot of work we don’t see—important work.”

Alice stared. Was she serious?

“Hey, Nance. Hello? That you in there?” Alice knocked on the table. “Invasion of the body snatchers?”

Nancy set her mouth in a prim line and shoved a flier in an envelope, moistened it with a sponge, and smoothed it shut. “I just think you should show a little respect,” she said flatly.

Alice sat back in her chair and gave a short laugh. “Well, aren’t you a little suck-up?” she said.

Rich banged through the door with another box.

“Thank you, ladies!” he sang out. “Oh, and take a break at ten thirty. We’ll need the room for the meeting.”

“What meeting?” Alice asked.

“Quarterly all-staff. Don’t you read your email, Alice?” he scolded in a teacher voice, wagging a finger at her.

He beamed at Nancy. “I’m sure Nancy read about the meeting.”

Alice watched her friend’s face twist into a girlish smile as Rich left the room.

“Wow. You are a first-class ass-kisser, Nance.”

Nancy flushed. “You think you know everything,” she hissed. She jerked herself up out of her chair and left.

Alice leaned back and stared at a brown stain on the ceiling. It was the shape of Florida and had been there the day she interviewed for this job almost twenty years ago. She had been so excited to get hired then. But now she just felt tired. She picked up another flier, this time reading it as she folded it.

“Hood River County Annual Noxious-Weed Program!” it declared, and laid out the dangers of the weed problem: choking wetlands, strangling native plants, harming wildlife. A cartoon of a desperate-looking quail had been drawn by a summer intern about six years ago. They used the same copy every year.

At the bottom of the page, Alice saw a new line: “SupraGro is a proud sponsor of the Hood River County Noxious-Weed Program.” Her breath caught. She took a photo of it and texted it to Stan.

“Read the bottom,” she wrote.

The extension service’s tests on Alice’s dead hives had shown a clear saturation of chemicals that matched SupraGro. But the noxious-weed program raised the stakes considerably. This went beyond spraying the orchards, which was bad enough. It was a county-wide project that covered hundreds of square miles and would start at the beginning of summer. It meant that SupraGro’s pesticides would be